The Central Platform that powers the Subscription Economy

By Aarthi Rayapura • June 7, 2017

During the Subscribed 2017 keynote yesterday, Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo announcedZuora Central, our brand new platform which functions as the intelligent hub to coordinate all order-to-cash operations for any business looking to succeed in the Subscription Economy!

Zuora Central frees companies from the limitations of antiquated technology because it functions as an intelligent hub that sits between ERP and CRM — neither of these technologies was designed to handle the operational and financial implications associated with subscription business models. Running on Zuora Central, any company can manage its complex, recurring, and hybrid revenue business models. Zuora Central integrates six essential order-to-cash engines that power the real-time updates across Zuora’s expansive product portfolio (Zuora Billing, Zuora RevPro, Zuora Collect, Zuora CPQ, and Zuora Insights), third party applications, and the more than 100 apps in the Zuora Connect Marketplace.

In brief, the core processing engines at the heart of Zuora Central are:

Subscription Orders Engine manages multi-year and multi-subscription changes over the lifecycle of a subscriber and automatically calculates key bookings metrics.

Rating Engine allows real-time monetization of any customer event such as usage or consumption.

In today’s super-exciting Product keynote at Subscribed 2017, Tom Krackeler, Zuora’s SVP of Product and his team made several new announcements and presented demos for:

Subscription Orders Engine: It lets you create complex orders from any channel across the entire subscriber lifecycle, provides powerful new order metrics, syncs to your billing, provisioning, and is the basis for your ASC 606 revenue recognition.

Zuora CPQ: The product’s latest capabilities support new pricing models like usage and time-based discounts, new quote types like upgrades, suspensions, and ramps, and offer new metrics to support sales comp plans based on changes in MRR and TCV. It gives your sales team the freedom to quote for any deal without breaking the back office!

Zuora Collect: The all-new Zuora Collect is the world’s first subscription receivables system. We designed it specifically for subscription businesses to help you optimize customer retention, and automate and streamline your collections process for any payment type – electronic or manual. What’s more, to give you the freedom to grow your business, we have the Collections Manager, a business automation tool that automates all those tedious collections activities using configurable workflows!

Zuora Insights: We put your most valuable subscription metrics at your fingertips – metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue, Churn Rate, Net Retention, Average Revenue Per Account, and Lifetime Value just to name a few. The new Insights Predictive Scoring tool offers two new metrics which rank subscribers based on the probability of a future outcome to occur. These are proprietary statistical and machine-learning algorithms which were developed by our own data science team. Now you’ll have the freedom to make strategic decisions with confidence.

Zuora RevPro: The countdown to a once-in-a-generation shift in accounting standards shows you don’t have much time to adopt the new ASC 606/IFRS 15 standards – just 191 days for public companies and 18 months for private companies! Enter Zuora RevPro, our event-based revenue automation application designed from the ground up to meet the new standards. The power of RevPro lies in the fact that rules for recognizing revenue can be configured based on any event. It also has the ability to post your revenue entries to popular financial applications and it comes with over 20 pre-built reports designed to help you stay on top of your key revenue data and metrics on a day-to-day basis. In a nutshell, RevPro will free businesses from the constraints of being out of compliance with the new standards and allow them to pursue any business strategy.

At Zuora, we work to unshackle companies in the Subscription Economy from the constraints of ERP so you can execute dynamic business models, keep up with dynamic subscriber relationships, and compete in dynamic markets. Many of the above mentioned new releases are available today while a few will be out in Q3! Learn more about our products here and see what our customers say here.